Adelaide IoT lab puts $1.4 million behind new product development

Satellite communications company Myriota is investing $1.36 million in new innovation lab to bring it’s low-cost, long-life Internet of Things (IoT) technology to market.

Myriota, which was founded in 2015 at the University of South Australia, has developed an Internet of Things (IoT) system to provide a low cost and long battery-life solution. The company is investing $1.36 million in an IoT lab in Adelaide, which will be matched by funding from the South Australian Government’s Future Jobs Fund.

Its system has already been deployed in field trials, with the investment to be used to take the next step in development by integrating it with a range of products and services.

“With the funding that we had at the time from the Australian Space Research program within the university, we set about solving those challenges and developing the technology with a pre-meditated commercialisation approach,” says David Haley, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Myriota.

The company’s technology involves tiny low-cost satellite transmitters that send low-powered messages to a constellation of nano satellites. This enables a large number of devices to directly communicate via the satellites.

The technology has a number of applications across agriculture, utilities, asset tracking and logistics, defence and maritime, and can be deployed in remote locations.

“At the moment, those applications are very limited in their coverage. In a country like Australia, where we only have around 30 per cent of cellular coverage, many of these applications aren’t being served at all,” Haley says.

“The reason for that is the existing satellite services that might be able to reach those areas are too expensive and too power-hungry.”

A challenge for the project has been how to support massive scale access to devices at a very low power so their batteries can last for a long time. Creating a secure link also needed to be overcome, with the team developing security at every stage of connectivity. In particular, a secure over-the-air link from devices to the satellite.

The identity of the device itself is also maintained as cryptographically secure, which prevents somebody from tracking the location of the device by snooping and listening into its identity. It also stops inauthentic messages being injected into the system through an authentication mechanism to ensure that every message that is received is genuinely from one of the terminals in the system.

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